In the 76 years since the founding of the modern state of Israel, the conflict with its Arab neighbors has consumed an enormous amount of the attention of national leaders, international organizations, diplomats, academics, and journalists. This conflict, which changed after the Israel-Egypt peace treaty of 1979 from one between and among sovereign states to a clash between the state of Israel and the Palestinians living in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, has drawn more attention by far than any other dispute in the world.
Yet the conflict persists. In one sense, this is surprising. It has become the conventional wisdom that everyone knows the formula for resolving it: two sovereign states, one Israeli, one Palestinian, living side by side in peace. Unfortunately, in this case “everyone” does not include the Palestinians. They have a different goal: the destruction of the state of Israel. Nor have they been shy about proclaiming this goal, although much of the world has found ways to ignore their unambiguous message.
In his provocative and important new book, Israel Victory: How Zionists Win Acceptance and Palestinians Get Liberated, Daniel Pipes, a distinguished scholar of Middle Eastern affairs and the president of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum, describes the dominant Palestinian approach to Israel as “rejectionism,” which he defines as “the negation, by any means necessary, of Judaism, Jews, Zionism, and Israel.” The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he notes, is more accurately described as “the Palestinian war on Israel.”
His description of rejectionism, analysis of its origins, and explanation of its staying power constitute one of the three original contributions his book makes to the debate about this much discussed but surprisingly poorly understood subject. The second such contribution is his counterintuitive but persuasive argument that Israel itself has been complicit in perpetuating Palestinian rejectionism.
Beginning with the 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords, which launched US-mediated Israeli-Palestinian negotiations intended to culminate in a peaceful, democratic Palestinian state – a goal that held no interest for Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat – Israel conducted a two-part policy of conciliation toward the Palestinians. One, which the author calls “enrichment,” sought to bring prosperity to the Palestinian territories, on the assumption – widely, confidently, but, as it turned out, erroneously held – that prosperity would create powerful vested interests among the Palestinians in good relations with their Jewish neighbors. In this way, enrichment would secure peace. Second, Israel sought to placate the Palestinians, making political and territorial concessions to them on the theory that these would generate goodwill, and goodwill would end the conflict.
Neither tactic worked. On the contrary, Pipes argues, they only served to convince the Palestinians that rejectionism was paying off, that Israel’s will was weakening, and that they should continue their campaign to destroy it. “Israelis managed not to notice,” he says, “that each concession amplified hostility while further radicalizing, exhilarating, and mobilizing the Palestinian body politic to more ambition and violence.”
Enrichment and placation having failed to bring the anticipated results, what should Israelis do? In response to this question, Israel Victory makes a third original contribution to the analysis and the politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It suggests that Israelis adopt a new approach, one missing from their policies toward their neighbors for several decades: they should seek victory. Victory, not conciliation, offers a path to peace.
The strategy of victory that Pipes outlines has two parts. First, Israel must destroy the governing organizations that embody and pursue rejectionism. Since October 7 of last year, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have made a good start on such a project in Gaza, where they have substantially reduced the power of Hamas, the genocide-seeking Islamist group in control there.
Moreover, for the first time the people of Gaza are paying a major price for rejectionism. The claim that the Palestinians have undergone enormous suffering at Israel’s hands is hollow. Pipes cites a study that found that, between 1950 and 2007, little more than 5,000 deaths “occurred in fighting between Palestinians and Israelis, making it something like the 200th most fatal conflict of that time period.” Since October 7, and contrary to the calumnies directed against it, the IDF has not conducted a campaign of indiscriminate slaughter of civilians in Gaza. By the standards of urban warfare, in which civilian casualties are always high, and especially in view of the Hamas policy of using homes, schools, and hospitals for military purposes, the ratio of civilian to military deaths among the Palestinians is certainly lower (and probably significantly lower) than in other, similar operations by other armies (including the American one) at other times in other places. The people of Gaza have not – unlike the Israelis Hamas attacked on October 7 – been targeted for massacre. Gazans have, however, lost their homes on a large scale. Hamas’s tactics have obliged the IDF to damage or destroy an appreciable proportion of the buildings in Gaza. That may diminish the commitment to rejectionism there.
In the West Bank, Yasir Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, now headed by his one-time deputy Mahmoud Abbas, is often characterized as being more moderate than Hamas; however, it is no less committed to rejectionism, although generally less violent in pursuing it. Its continuation in power, in Pipes’ view, like that of Hamas, presents an obstacle to victory. Economic pressure can, he believes, bring it down without war.
He recommends that the fall of the Palestinian Authority be followed by “tough Israeli rule . . . along the lines of what exists in Egypt and Jordan,” which should be accompanied by a concerted, protracted campaign to change Palestinian attitudes toward Israel. This exercise in what was once called “winning the hearts and minds” of the target population forms the second component of the author’s formula for Israeli victory.
Such a transformation, he argues, is not impossible. The Arab countries, having pursued their own rejectionist policies for a quarter-century in response to the establishment of the Jewish state, have come to terms with Israel. They have accepted its permanence – often grudgingly and sometimes tacitly, to be sure, but they have ceased to make war on it. In addition, Pipes cites surveys of attitudes in the West Bank and Gaza that, although not necessarily entirely reliable since the respondents do not live in free societies, show that about 20 percent of Palestinians are ready to live in peace with Israel. The strategy of victory has as its goal turning that minority into a comfortable majority.
Is what Pipes recommends feasible? He concedes that the process he wants Israelis to set in motion is bound to be long and difficult. It is far from clear, furthermore, that Israelis would be willing to pay the domestic financial and international political price — not to mention the price in manpower – that taking control of the Palestinian territories would exact, and whether, if they did, they would be able to mount a campaign of persuasion there that would bring about the necessary changes in Palestinian attitudes. The prospects for the Pipes strategy’s success are uncertain. What is certain however – and what emerges from Israel Victory with a clarity that is either bracing or dismaying, depending on one’s point of view – is that the other, prevailing ways of ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have failed.
